Hi, you may have seen some of my pained ramblings about my chronic pain and have decided to offer some advice. Maybe I was venting on social media, or perhaps I wrote something on a forum a few days/months/years ago that you want to help with. While I do appreciate the sentiment, there are a few things you should consider before messaging me with your solutions to my problems!

First of all, I have been dealing with these problems since 1996. My wrist problems are old enough to drink. Statistically-speaking, I have probably been working on this since before you were programming, or using computers, or maybe even before you were born.

And yes, I am also aware of software that can convert humming into notation! Logic actually comes with some built in. That stuff I actually do use somewhat, but its utility is still limited and, again, only scratches the surface of what’s necessary for music production. It won’t twiddle the knobs or set up my LFOs or even do basic effect routing for me. And I still have to clean all the notes up afterward anyway.

I also spend a significant amount of time helping other people with their code and performing code reviews and sharing best practices; when I am trying to help someone else who doesn’t know how to program very well, I can’t simply talk to them at a high level about how they should be doing it, since if they were on that level I probably wouldn’t be assisting them in the first place.

Perhaps you just want to share your story about what worked for you/your spouse/some random person you met on the bus. I’m very glad that it worked for you/your spouse/some random person you met on the bus! But it’s probably stuff I’ve heard before or tried already. And explaining that repeatedly doesn’t exactly help with my wrists either.

Also, I know this reponse may seem a bit grumpy; after all, you were only trying to help. It is difficult for me to remain civil, cheerful, and patient when I am constantly at a 7 or 8 on the Mankoski pain scale, which is when I am most likely to be venting about these problems in the first place.

So, again, thank you for wanting to share your advice, but please be aware of the greater context first.

My current wrist care regimen, which is… well, slowly helping me to not be in quite so much pain (more slowly than I’d like):

Using Time Out with the following breaks set up (in decreasing priority order):

Get to bed: break for 4 minutes every 19 minutes, between 1 AM and 6 AM

Normal: break for 3 minutes every 20 minutes, all day long; only allow 3 1-minute postponements per day, and show the postpone count

Micro: break for 10 seconds every 4 minutes

Exercise: 5 minutes every hour, all day long; only allow 3 5-minute postponements per day, and show the postpone count. Randomly selects one of a few different wrist- and core-strength exercises for me to do.

Lately my sleep has been pretty much garbage, and I probably need a sleep study. But sleep studies are expensive and a lot of hassle to maybe find out nothing’s actually wrong, so in the meantime I got a sleep tracker kit.

There has been yet another explosion of discourse over on Trans Twitter as a result of a couple of prominent people talking about their beliefs regarding dysphoria and what it means to be “really” trans.

The term “transmed” has come about, as an attempt at a more “gentle” form of what many folks call “truscum,” namely that you must feel dysphoria to be Really Trans, and that the end goal absolutely must be a “proper” transition, which is such an incredibly reductive, prescriptive, and invalidating set of concepts that it does much more harm than good to people who are already having difficulty questioning themselves and need support and compassion to figure out where they stand and what they need.

The problem with discussing dysphoria is that it’s such an ineffable, subjective concept that it’s impossible for two people to even agree on what it is – hell, it’s difficult for one person to agree on what it is – and it can also refer to so many things, many of which overshadow each other and behave in confusing ways, and thus how can any objective criterion be formed based on what essentially comes down to what someone’s feeling?

Note: While reading this you may be tempted to give me advice on things to help with chronic pain or wrist problems. Believe me when I say I have almost certainly heard it before, and I am not interested in advice; I simply want to help spread understanding.

I have, since my late teenage years, had chronic pain in both wrists, a result of heavy computer use that started when I was very young. I was fascinated by computers and absolutely determined to become an expert at everything that could be done on them; this drive led me to many spans of overworking as I tried to do everything I could in as short a time as I could. This obsessiveness combined with poor ergonomic practices led to a slow buildup of nerve adhesions and chronic tendinitis.

So, it’s not that the Flickr Random Image Generatr had actually gone anywhere, but when I migrated all my stuff to new hosting it broke, and while it was easy to get the old, crappy, written-in-Perl-in-two-hours-ten-years-ago version working again, I decided to rewrite it.

First off, the original purpose was for finding random images to post to forums, and as such I had a bunch of stuff to make it easy to do that. That was no longer a use case I want to overtly support, however, and I only keep the FLRIG up because I like using it to get random inspiration for settings and drawings and the like.

Another problem, though, is that the old version was directly parsing the RSS feed, which only provided limited information about the image; notably, it had no useful information about copyright in it, and every now and then I get an annoyed message from a photo’s owner claiming that I wasn’t properly attributing things or that I was stealing their images or the like. I had a standard response about how it’s just reformatting the Flickr public RSS feed, which didn’t provide any useful copyright information for me to display. Well, their Atom feed actually does provide license information, so I am better able to provide that information.

Since I was going to switch to the Atom feed, I figured I’d might as well switch to a proper feed parser, and if I was going to do that I’d might as well rewrite it in Python (which has a pretty good feed parsing library) and Flask.

Most of the code is actually in the Jinja template, and the way it filters stuff out of the description tag is incredibly shoddy, and the formatting could be better in general, but overall I think this is an improvement which will make the photographers happier.

So hey, I’m working on migrating all my hosting and registrations away from Dreamhost. As far as hosting goes I’m just going to host everything on my Linode server for now, since that’s paid up for the next two years or so and it has plenty of capacity available.

But I’m also using Dreamhost as my registrar and DNS provider at the moment, and I’d like to move those as well. (Not only do I not trust them at this point, but their DNS management tools are abysmal and geared only towards people using their hosting.)

What registrars do people recommend, and what DNS hosts do people recommend? In my ideal world they’d be one and the same, although I’m fine with doing a mix-and-match if it makes sense.

My hard requirement is having WHOIS privacy, and a very high priority is having DNS hosting included. Right now my three frontrunners are Hover, Namecheap, and Gandi. Here’s my impressions of them:

Hover:

Plus: Their DNS hosting is easy to work with, and supports wildcard records

Minus: They charge extra for WHOIS privacy ($2.88/year). Or maybe they don’t. Their site keeps flip-flopping on this.

Minus: I used them for HTTPS in the past (before LetsEncrypt was available) and they were difficult to work with and felt kinda sketchy/bait-and-switchy

Gandi:

Plus: Geeks love them

Plus: WHOIS privacy is included

Minus: Registrations are quite expensive (.biz costs $18.78)

So, it seems like Namecheap is my best bet, but I have misgivings about them based on my prior experiences with them and with how their WHOIS guard thing can’t decide whether it’s free or not…

Has anyone reading this formed an opinion about these three companies? Is there another one I really should look into?

Also, Linode supports DNS hosting as well, although the management tools are kind of crude/low-level and I’d also have to do all the DNS hosting transfer stuff if I were to change hosting providers, so if I’m going to bundle my DNS hosting with something I’d rather bundle it with the registrar. (Although for now I’ve transferred all of my DNS hosting over to LiNode which worked well enough. I guess any time I change hosting providers DNS is going to be a pain anyway, so.)

Update: Looks like the reason the back-and-forth was going on with Namecheap’s WhoisGuard pricing was because I happened to be checking their site while they were rolling out an update — they just officially announced that WhoisGuard is now “Free for life.” Well, that certainly makes my decision easier!

So, this is my first new blog entry on my brand new website, my first
(relatively) clean start since the last accretion disc began in early
2003. I realize that the current blog template has none of the old template’s
charm; don’t worry, I’ll be bringing the plaid look back eventually.

Here are some ruminations, brought on by me spending all evening going
through my old blog trying to find things worth saving. There were a few useful
articles here and there, which I have more fully-integrated into the rest of my
site, but I’m finding that most of my old “blog content” is just not worth the
hassle of preserving.